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Experimental Fiction Now

DEFINITIONS

In Art as Experience, the philosopher John Dewey describes a cycle in art and literary history whereby works initially thought to be too radically experimental ultimately are accepted as “classics” that themselves become objects of imitation:

[T]he fruits of the new procedure are absorbed; they are naturalized and effect certain modifications of the old tradition. This period establishes the new aims and hence the new techniques as having “classic” validity, and is accompanied with a prestige that holds over into subsequent periods.

Dewey’s notion that “new procedures” create “certain modifications of the old tradition” is strongly reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s argument in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that “existing monuments”

form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.

Both Dewey and Eliot are suggesting that without experiment in art and literature, the “supervention of novelty,” the great works of the past merely ossify into a “tradition” that no longer inspires artists and writers to, in effect, outdo the “existing monuments,” to bring those monuments into active communication with the present. “Certain modifications of the old tradition” are needed to keep the old tradition from becoming merely old, as well as to invigorate the new through contact with the genuine achievements of the past. Thus both Dewey and Eliot view experiment as a way of maintaining the vitality of the tradition, but also see the tradition as subject to the revision prompted by “the really new.”

For Dewey, the reader or audience must as well have some familiarity with tradition in order to appreciate a truly new work of art. According to Dewey, “the perceiver, as much as the creator, needs a rich and developed background which, whether it be painting, in the field of poetry, or music, cannot be achieved except by consistent nurture of interest.” Since Dewey believes that the value of art resides in the experience of it, that experience would be impoverished without this “developed background” of tradition. The experimental work of art threatens to be meaningless if the “perceiver” can’t recognize the broader practices made visible by a tradition that the work still encompasses. “Rich and developed” does not mean encyclopedic, and a reader need not formally “study” literature and literary history. At some point, in fact, a pursuit of tradition for its own sake is as likely to impede our ability to experience art deeply as encourage it, as the customary practices come to seem “normal” and departures from them unwelcome. This embrace of tradition by all too many readers when they encounter “the really new” is finally not just an objection to the “experimental” in literature but often also a rejection of the whole notion that literature is “art” that should prompt fresh experience, in favor of the belief it is primarily a source of wisdom.

Dewey is well aware of the clinical connotations of the term “experimental” when applied to the arts and thus suggests an alternative:

If instead of saying “experimental,” one were to say “adventurous,” one would probably win general assent—so great is the power of words. Because the artist is a lover of unalloyed experience, he shuns objects that are already saturated, and he is therefore always on the growing edge of things. By the nature of the case, he is as unsatisfied with what is established as is a geographic explorer or scientific inquirer. The “classic” when it was produced bore the marks of adventure. . . .

In using the term “experimental fiction” throughout this book, I am using it in Dewey’s sense as “adventurous.” There is, of course, a latent danger of taking Dewey’s insistence on “new forms and techniques” too far. If every work of fiction was “new” in these terms, there would be no “mainstream” and no doubt fewer readers of fiction. And it is certainly the case that some “experimental” fiction fails in balancing the formally or stylistically “new” with the need to provide the reader some recognizable variety of aesthetic beauty or pleasure, some tangible sense of satisfaction. Perhaps most experimental fiction fails in this way, or at least doesn’t convince the reader such satisfaction can indeed be found. But much of it, especially the experimental fiction produced by numerous American writers over the past 50 years, has both memorably extended the “growing edge of things” and left behind fully realized works of art.

Dewey has not been alone in finding the term “experimental” not altogether satisfying as a label identifying formally innovative art, fiction in particular. For those who think that every new work of fiction is implicitly experimental, necessarily one-of-a-kind, the term seems redundant. For writers who want their work to be assessed, at least in part, by its departures from formal or stylistic convention, some such term is surely desirable, although not all writers have been comfortable with designating a particular work an “experiment,” perhaps objecting to the parallel with the scientific experiment and its association with the principle of “trial and error.” Who, after all, wants to invite the possibility that what one has written might be in “error,” an unsuccessful experiment?

The categorization of certain works of fiction as unconventional or unorthodox enough to be called experimental has probably been most emphasized by scholars and critics, for whom such a category makes critical discussion more focused (some might say more esoteric). “Trial and error” is not really the defining feature for most critics. Generally, critical commentary on postwar experimental fiction (or more broadly “postmodern” fiction) has focused on “experiment” as, in Jerome Klinkowitz’s words, the “disruption” of a “conservative stability of form” in literary fiction as descended from 19th century writers. Certainly modernist experimental writers such as Joyce, Woolf, Proust, and Faulkner “disrupted” this stability as well, but their experiments did not really dislodge the assumptions of realism—they could even be called an extension of these assumptions into what is now called “psychological realism,” through which the writer portrays subjective consciousness, not external reality itself, as what is “really real.” From the perspective provided by Klinkowitz, “trial and error” is not the guiding principle of experiment but rather the notion that “stability” is itself not a desirable state where the art of fiction is concerned.

It is true that “experimental fiction” is ultimately a catch-all term of convenience that doesn’t necessarily signal anything very specific about what experimental writers are up to (another reason why Dewey’s “adventurous” is at least somewhat more descriptive). Klinkowitz prefers “disruption,” while other critics have written about “breaking the sequence” or “the art of excess” or “anti-story.” In most cases, however, these critics are really interested in what Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs in Breaking the Sequence simply accept as “innovations in form.” Friedman and Fuchs also provide a handy description of the elements of “stability” against which most adventurous writers are rebelling: “Plot linearity that implies a story’s purposeful forward movement; a single, authoritative storyteller; well-motivated characters interacting in recognizable social patterns; the crucial conflict deterring the protagonist from the ultimate goal; the movement to closure. . . .” Perhaps the most succinct statement of the motivations underlying experimental fiction would be the remarks made by the experimental writer John Hawkes: “I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.”

A critic who did use the term “experimental fiction” straightforwardly was Robert Scholes in his book Fabulationand Metafiction (1979). In the chapter of that book called “The Nature of Experimental Fiction,” he writes: “Forms atrophy and lose touch with the vital ideas of fiction. Originality in fiction, rightly understood, is the successful attempt to find new forms that are capable of tapping once again the sources of fictional vitality.” Scholes’s book popularized the term “metafiction” as a more specific term encompassing the tendencies in postwar American fiction that made readers think of them as “experimental”: “Metafiction. . .attempts to assault or transcend the laws of fiction—an undertaking which can only be achieved from within fictional form.” Writers such as William Gass, John Barth, Robert Coover, and Donald Barthelme were “working in that rarefied air of metafiction, trying to climb beyond Beckett and Borges, toward things that no critic—not even a metacritic, if there were such a thing—can discern.”

In my view, the foundational works of American metafiction are John Barth’s story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and Robert Coover’s novel The Universal Baseball Association (1968), as well as his collection Pricksongs and Descants (1969). These books show the influence of precursors such as Beckett and Borges, as well as Nabokov, but finally Barth and Coover here bring together most explicitly the strategies used by these precursors that work against the maintenance of transparent realism by calling attention to the act of writing or the processes of representation, pointing the reader away from the unfolding narrative and toward the artificial devices by which all literary narratives are constructed and developed. This self-consciousness, or self-reflexivity, led ultimately to the designation “metafiction”—fiction about fiction—as the term used to identify this kind of fiction that ultimately called into question all established conventions that work to hide their own artifice.

In Barth’s fiction, these conventions are challenged directly, in stories that blatantly reveal themselves to be fabrications, that examine self-reflexively the process and tools of storytelling, that delight in all the contrivances and tricks that are involved in storytelling even as they acknowledge that such contrivances are always involved. Coover’s fiction indulges in these sorts of diversions as well, although his work is more likely to explore the ways in which fiction and fiction-making incorporate, perhaps inevitably, elements of ritual and myth and to explode the conventions of realism and traditional narrative from within, to produce a kind of kaleidoscopic surrealism rather than the comic anatomies of storytelling to be found in Lost in the Funhouse. Metafiction in both Barth and Coover was simultaneously an attempt to clear the ground of the remaining inherited presuppositions about the “craft” of fiction and to make possible a more unrestricted conception of what actually constitutes literary craft, to open up the ground for new practices that might expand fiction’s potential range, that might even lead to a renewal of storytelling in new forms and styles.

These books remain the touchstones of American metafiction, but they were soon followed by additional works of equal value and accomplishment, such as William Gass’s Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife (1971), Gilbert Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971) and Mulligan Stew (1979), as well as some of the work of Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman. These writers continued to ask questions not just about the conventions of fiction but about the very medium of writing, about the established usages of language itself. Gass and Sukenick play games with typography, Sorrentino adds to metafiction his outrageous humor and inveterate experimentation, Federman uses metafiction (or what he called “surfiction”) to question the “reality” of reality. In my opinion, while some of this work may occasionally go out of print, it will always be rediscovered because it still seems innovative despite the passage of time and the borrowing of its innovations by later writers.